Betting against Rupert Murdoch hasn’t gone very well for many people, including me. When he bought The Wall Street Journal in 2007 and brought in a trusted associate, Robert Thomson from The Times of London, I said that he might ruin one of the country’s most important newspapers.
That did not happen. Mr. Thomson’s version of The Journal, with a stronger focus on general news, a beefed-up Saturday edition and a luxury magazine, has been a hit with readers. It may not have the literary majesty of its previous incarnation, but the new bosses made it clear that was hardly a priority.
The Journal has added subscribers to become the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation and has reached a new group of advertisers outside the narrow confines of business. The financial results are tougher to know, but they won’t remain opaque for long. Early next year, News Corporation will split into two companies, with the entertainment assets bundled into the Fox Group and the publishing assets separated into a division that will retain the News Corporation name.
Mr. Murdoch will be able to invest in print without riling investors, but the publishing operation will no longer be connected to billions in revenue from hits like “Avatar,” “American Idol” and Fox News, making the challenge of running it a steep one.
That challenge will fall to Mr. Thomson, an entrepreneurial editor, but not someone who has overseen a sprawling publishing operation that includes broadcast properties in Australia along with newspapers there and in Britain as well as The New York Post, Dow Jones Newswires, and, of course, The Journal.
Making a splash in the slow-growth print businesses will be tough — the publishing arm of News Corporation is estimated to account for 24 percent of the revenue, but only 11 percent of the profits.
Which brings us to whom and what Mr. Thomson is leaving behind at The Journal and Dow Jones, the linchpin of the publishing division.
Mr. Thomson’s promotion will put the newspaper in the hands of Gerard Baker, his deputy who will succeed him as managing editor, and Lex Fenwick, the publisher of The Journal and chief executive of Dow Jones. The celebration of the next era was commemorated in a video that was posted online minutes after it happened last Monday. In it, Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Baker are seen popping the cork on a bottle of Champagne, which Mr. Murdoch promptly poured on Mr. Baker’s head as Mr. Thomson looked on. (Mr. Baker, who is Catholic, made the sign of the cross after his bubbly baptism.)
The celebration clanked a bit — Champagne in the newsroom is usually reserved for Pulitzer victories, something that hasn’t happened in five years on the news side at The Journal. But it clanked for another reason. Many people, including the dozen or so current and former employees I spoke with (who did not want to be identified criticizing their bosses, past or present), worry over Mr. Thomson’s departure because they think Mr. Baker and Mr. Fenwick are not up to their roles.
With a background as a neoconservative columnist from Britain, Mr. Baker shares Mr. Thomson’s politics, but little of his managerial experience or his history of reinventing newsrooms. Mr. Baker was a columnist at The Times of London and its United States editor and also worked as the Washington bureau chief of The Financial Times. His antipathy for the current administration was memorialized in an appearance on Fox News during which he satirized the president as a false messiah.
After three years as a deputy managing editor of The Journal, Mr. Baker has no initiatives to call his own and little constituency in the newsroom. On Tuesday, the day after he was appointed, he walked the halls of the newspaper and for the reporters I spoke with, seeing him out and about was a startling sight.
When he moved to The Journal in 2009, Mr. Baker was, by dint of interest and skill set, a columnist and pundit and, as I have written here in the past, he hasn’t been shy about imposing his political and religious views on news coverage. (This tendency remains strong, according to current employees.)
The irony of bemoaning the replacement of Mr. Thomson, a man they once feared, was not lost on many of the people I talked to. Mr. Baker’s succession became clear when Alan Murray, a longtime Journal editor whom many considered to be in the running for the job, said in November that he was leaving to become president of the Pew Research Center. Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Thomson obviously trust Mr. Baker, but he has little experience in running a big news enterprise full of many kingdoms and has yet to impress a deeply skeptical newsroom.
Mr. Fenwick has certainly played in the big leagues before, when he ran Bloomberg L.P. A flamboyant and hard-driving executive from the “Glengarry Glen Ross” school of management, he is feared by the executives who work for him, at least the ones who remain after a purge that made room for loyalists he brought over from his 25-year tenure at Bloomberg.
After arriving at the beginning of the year to replace Les Hinton, who had become embroiled in the hacking scandal in Britain, he dismantled the executive suite, ordering that managers leave their offices for an open floor plan that mirrored the environment at Bloomberg. Unfortunately for his new employer, he has also replicated a management approach that came to be seen as counterproductive. In his final years there, his portfolio was diminished, and in 2008, he lost his role as chief executive of the entire organization and was put in charge of Bloomberg Ventures.
He is leading the effort to make Dow Jones a player in the financial data business by developing a proprietary Web product to compete with Reuters and Bloomberg, instead of having the company’s information carried on those competitors’ terminals. Although deferential to Mr. Thomson, he habitually berates and bullies people who work for him in very public settings, according to other senior executives who have witnessed the tirades. An expansive Reuters article in October suggested that Mr. Fenwick was erratic, profane and hard to work for, and many of the people I’ve spoken with at The Journal say the account was all too accurate. And he is now in the indelicate position of reporting to Mr. Thomson, who had reported to him.
Mr. Murdoch’s choices for his new company pose a risk for The Journal, its employees and readers, like me, who still treasure the paper. And these are the men Mr. Murdoch has picked. Would I bet against them? Perhaps, but that would just be speculation. Mr. Murdoch has already bet his company on them.
The Media Equation: For Wall Street Journal, Leadership at a Crossroads
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